How is the Chinese government marking international mother language day on February 21? By legalizing the erasure of mother languages.
In December 2025, according to the NPC Observer, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee signed off on revisions to the Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language, originally adopted in 2000. The revisions remove a provision that allowed speakers of “minority languages” to use those as the medium of instruction in schools, stating simply that such education is “no longer necessary.”
A years-long trend of replacing Mongolian-, Tibetan-, and Uyghur-medium instruction with Mandarin Chinese-medium instruction is now codified in law. Students in these communities will now only be taught their mother tongue as a single, standalone class; all other classes will be taught in Chinese.
There is no evidence that the NPC or relevant government agencies consulted with affected communities on this matter. While families in those communities sometimes do express support for bilingual education, they rarely endorse an approach that significantly marginalizes their mother tongues.
The NPC’s blithe determination that mother tongue education is not “necessary” stands in stark contrast to domestic law, including Article 4 of the Constitution and the law Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law, and international human rights law regarding equal access to education.
Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s nakedly assimilationist strategy has taken many forms, ranging from mass arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances of ethnic communities to criminalizing their faith. United Nations officials have raised concerns that some of these policies may constitute crimes against humanity.
Language restrictions are especially pernicious, eroding multiple aspects of community and identity with a goal of eradicating these communities’ distinct culture. A January 2026 report by the United Nations special rapporteur on minority rights cited Chinese government policies of language erasure as a form of “extermination,” and argued that such practices “should be qualified as genocide and be treated as such by the international community.”
Across Tibet, abusive colonial boarding schools rob children of their mother tongue, such that grandparents can no longer communicate directly with them. Uyghurs endure regional authorities’ efforts to destroy their culture, including by replacing Uyghur-language textbooks with ones in Chinese, making it harder to pass down or even appreciate everything from poetry and literature to religious texts. In Inner Mongolia, protests erupted when officials began making changes to language and curriculum; authorities responded by arresting protesters.
The human cost of these policies is already apparent. Renowned Uyghur scholar and Xinjiang Folklore Research Center founder Rahile Dawut is serving a life sentence for “separatism” after authorities subjected her to enforced disappearance in 2017. The same year, Tibetan language activist Tashi Wangchuk was sentenced to five years in prison for advocating for greater Tibetan medium instruction in schools. In October 2024, a public security bureau in Qinghai Province detained him for 15 days for videos he posted on social media advancing his language rights activism.
Ethnic Mongolian dissident Hada disappeared over a year ago, when he was reported to be in ill health. A writer and advocate for Mongolian identity and culture, Hada spent 15 years in prison, starting in 1995, for protecting and promoting Mongolian culture, and endured round-the-clock surveillance after his release.
Research by education experts worldwide shows that children learn best when they first learn in their mother tongues. International human rights law on the right to education, including equal access to education, protects the right to mother tongue education. The Chinese government is party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which oblige Beijing to provide adequate and truly bilingual education to communities.
The Chinese government is overdue for review by the Committee on the Rights of the Child to assess its implementation of the convention, but Beijing has largely ignored past recommendations by the committee on this topic. Due to the committee’s backlog and the U.N.’s ongoing funding crisis, the review has yet to be scheduled.
Still, the CRC review presents an opportunity that should not be squandered. Diaspora communities and civil society organizations should submit reports documenting how the Chinese government has infringed on the right to mother language education. Concerned governments should follow proceedings, and be prepared to take concrete action at the Human Rights Council to hold Beijing accountable and to help sustain mother language education outside China.
International Mother Language Day exists to affirm what Beijing’s legislature just denied: linguistic and cultural diversity. The question is what the rest of the world is willing to do about it.
